Mirah Office Hours

This week I decided to focus just on bugs. I picked a few that looked interesting and set about investigating.

I decided to look at #108, #150, #151, #68 and #52.

108 I realized, I hadn’t thought enough about. It’s really a design thing. Do you want to require that your closures match signatures with the methods the implement? What if you don’t care about the arguments because everything you want to do has to do with the closed scope and not with what you’re passed? I could see it both ways. On the one hand, requiring a matching signature ensures all the types and whatnot are correct. On the other hand, if you aren’t using the passed arguments, they are just boilerplate code.

I think we should allow closures to have no arguments where the method they are implementing has them for niceness. But it should be an all or nothing thing. Either no parameters, or parameters matching the signature of the method you expect to be implementing.

#52

I spent most of my time on this one. It seemed straight forward at first, but had a number of tricky bits that took some working out. The problem was that if you had a begin rescue end block, and treated it as an expression if the result types of the block itself and the rescue clauses differed, Mirah wouldn’t raise an exception, but the JVM would. For example (gist):

foo either is an int or a String, which would be fine in Ruby–but not in Mirah because Mirah has static typing.

So, I set about fixing it. The first thing was to define the valid behavior. What I came up with was this:

if a begin rescue block is treated as an expression, check the compatibility of its result types

if it’s not an expression, don’t check the result types

The second one is nicer because it lets you not care when you don’t want to care. For example (gist):

If we checked result types in both expressions and statements, the above would fail to compile, which would suck.

I started by writing a couple tests of the expected behavior. I wanted to get an inference error when I used the rescue as an expression, but not as a statement.

Then I went looking for other, similar pieces of functionality that I could use for a guide. I found that if elses also follow this pattern, so I wanted to look at how If AST nodes were inferred, trying to get a handle on how I would change rescues. I grepped through lib/ for If’s infer method and found it in lib/mirah/ast/flow.rb. What it does is get the if body’s result type, and the else’s result type and check to see if they are compatible (gist).

Rescue inference was a little more complicated than If because rescue’s have a lot more pieces. First, you have the body between the begin and the first rescue. Then, there can be multiple rescue clauses, each handling a different set of exceptions. Finally, if there’s an else, it runs after the body if there is no exception. There’s also ensure which is run after, but doesn’t return anything, so it shouldn’t affect result type comparisons (need to write a test for that …).

So, the types that need to be compatible are the that of the body if there isn’t an else or the else’s and all the rescue clauses. Kind of complicated. But pretty doable. I modified the Rescue node’s infer method to test compatibility of the body or the else and all the clauses, which worked for the tests I wrote but broke other tests.

It broke other tests because of how deferred inference works. When inference is reattempted, the typer assumes that the deferred node was evaluated as an expression, which breaks when it is a Rescue because its inference depends on how it was used.

So as a work around, I added an ivar to the Rescue node to cache how it was initially inferred (lib/mirah/flow.rb).

It’s a hack, but it resolved the issue. I’d like to look into how to change things to make expression vs statementness be something defined in the AST instead of decided at inference time, or make it more explicit that the expression-ness is determined by the parent node during inference.

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on Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 at 9:50 am and is filed under Mirah.
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